Paul Cadmus

🔳Paul Cadmus (December 17, 1904 – December 12, 1999) was an American artist. He is best known for his egg tempera paintings of gritty social interactions in urban settings. He also produced many highly finished drawings of single nude male figures.

His paintings combine elements of eroticism and social critique in a style often called magic realism.

He was transfixed by the human body, both the ideal and the repulsive. 

His ideal was a stylized erotic version of the male body. He found the grotesque everywhere from Greenwich Village cafes, subway stations, the beach at Coney Island to American tourists in an Italian piazza. His art is a form of satire and caricature of his subjects.

In 1990, Michael Kimmelman wrote that Cadmus' art served "as a reminder that, contrary to the standard view, realism was still a vital tradition in American art during the middle of this century, one that drew from many of the same sources that inspired the Abstract Expressionists who were widely thought to have rendered realism obsolete."

Current exhibitions: 

Interwoven Lives George Platt Lynes and his Friends, Sep 6–Oct 20, 2001, DC Moore Gallery, New York, NY USA

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